November 15, 2015

ADDED: 10 minutes after putting up this post, quite by chance, I ran across this old post of mine, "Bolus":

Some readers enjoyed my use of the word "bolus" 2 posts down. (A "feminist blog is committed to chewing things into a bolus of feminism.... When the evidence is flimsy, lubricate the bolus with the notion of the subtlety of the oppression. It might be swallowable.") That's not a word that would have come naturally to me if I hadn't read Mary Roach's cool book "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal," so let me provide you with a reading:

The study of oral processing is... about the entire “oral device”: teeth, tongue, lips, cheeks, saliva, all working together toward a singular unpicturesque goal: bolus formation. The word bolus has many applications, but we are speaking of this one: a mass of chewed, saliva-moistened food particles. Food that is in— as one researcher put it, sounding like a license plate— "the swallowable state."

I don’t think the scientists are uninterested. I think they may be disgusted. This is a job where on any given day, you may find yourself documenting “intraoral bolus rolling” or shooting magnified close-ups of “retained custard” with the Wageningen University tongue-camera...

Humans, even physiologists, don’t like to think about food once they’ve begun to process it. The same chanterelle and Gorgonzola galette that had the guests swooning is, after two seconds in the mouth, an object of universal revulsion....

Novelist Patrick O'Brian's character Stephen Maturin Ship's Surgeon used the term constantly in the 20 odd novels of the Master and Commander series. It was a common medical term at turn of the 18th century.

Rob, you made me laugh, but I'm pretty sure Ms. Lewinsky did not swallow at all, which was always one of the more disappointing aspects of the whole sordid tale. (If you're going to blow the president, blow the president, for chrissake!)

Of course had she done so, we might never had had the blue dress, and then where would we be? (Seems like there should be a good blue/blew pun here, a la Tobias from Arrested Development.)

Blogger surfed said...Novelist Patrick O'Brian's character Stephen Maturin Ship's Surgeon used the term constantly in the 20 odd novels of the Master and Commander series. It was a common medical term at turn of the 18th century.--------------------------------------------

On my third time through the series and really didn't notice.Now you've given me a mental tic about it.

@LarsPorsena - My apologies for the brain worm. I reread the entire canon one each decade. I'm an historical artist and I have rendered formal portraits of the HMS Sophie and the HMS Surprise. Send your email address to me at surfed256@hotmail.com and I will attach a file of my artwork of them and send it back to you.

See Recommendation: How to talk about your Iraq vote (advice to Hillary Clinton). Excerpt:President Clinton was right to strictly enforce the Gulf War ceasefire despite the opposition of the Security Council members that advocated for Saddam in 1998 and again in 2002-2003. Your husband was right to impress the gravity of Saddam's "clear and present danger to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people everywhere" (President Clinton) upon you as a Senator and his successor in the White House. According to the Iraq Survey Group and the Iraqi Perspectives Project that studied captured regime documents, President Clinton's dire warnings about Saddam from 1998-1999 were correct. But for the regime change, Saddam would have rearmed - was in fact already rearming in violation of UNSCR 687 - Saddam was a terrorist and tyrant, and Saddam's peculiar decision-making, ambition, and the nature of his regime were not reconstructed as mandated by the Gulf War ceasefire.

When the the law, policy, and facts underlying Operation Iraqi Freedom are correctly understood, it is clear that your husband and his successor in the White House were right about Saddam. Your critics and competitors for the Democratic nomination for President are wrong now and they were wrong in 2008. You were right to vote for the 2002 AUMF.